Comment by jacoblambda
8 months ago
It's 10k a month for them to set up a dedicated IP address pool so that they could BYOIP and buy their own IP addresses instead of getting the IP addresses in cloudflare's main IP address pool repeatedly banned or reputation harmed.
i.e. it's a $10k fee for maintaining the infrastructure for a quarantine around their services
Why can't they communicate than then? BYOIP also costs nothing to produce.
> Why can't they communicate than then?
They did. Repeatedly. You see it mentioned in the few emails the OP chose to share. But they also didn't share the other communication they had over the month long discussion they had with cloudflare.
> BYOIP also costs nothing to produce.
That's not really accurate. Cloudflare is entirely built around one big unified anycast network. If you want to provision an entirely separate network that maintains all the same features they are using from the main cloudflare network, that's going to require provisioning a lot of cpu time and routing table slots at a lot of different sites plus whatever admin and engineer overhead comes from maintaining this quarantined service.
Big difference between:
>Here's the features you get with enterprise
And
>If you do not use byoip with your service you cannot be a customer, and also pay us $120k upfront while we do not tell you why, it's only a 40x price increase. You have 24h.
As a network engineer I'm well aware of what it costs to add prefixes to what you announce over bgp, some miniscule additional CPU overhead, likely unmeasurable. Even slow mips processors could process full table bgp.
This is literally all written communication they gave us. The only other thing was calls. Not calls with anyone that had any knowledge about what any issues were, but calls with sales.
The costs for announcing the customer's IPs and making sure that only they are the ones actually sitting on them would be minuscule. Nowhere near $10k/mo. Maybe $100/mo.
Anycast/unicast changes nothing here. Anycast simply means that the same prefix is announced in multiple different PoPs.